Tag Archives: royal mail

I’m on the road. Therefore, rather than write anything new, I’m fobbing you off with something I wrote a year ago, before anyone much read this blog…

Thirty-six years ago, the streets were empty. The National Union of Mineworkers had spent half-a-year working to rule; coal-stocks had slowly dwindled and the power stations had all run out. Factories and offices shut down; everything stopped. Twenty-six years ago, the NUM walked out completely, and stayed out for a year. But nothing except the mines themselves shut down. Thatcher had pre-empted the strike. The mines had been sent into overproduction long before and the power stations all had stockpiles. The country had the means to import coal. And in the mean time, power generation had shifted further into oil, gas and nuclear. The government had made sure that the industrial action could not cripple the country.

Ten years ago today, the streets were empty. The Road Haulage industry, with the support of the petroleum industry, had blockaded the oil refineries and fuel distribution network for eight days, and the country’s petrol stations had been dry for four. The private stockpiles of companies with fleets were running out, and the little that was left had been reserved for the emergency services. Train companies operating non-electrified lines cancelled services — and this time they even had an excuse for it. Tesco began rationing food, and the post went uncollected and undelivered. Hospitals ran out of blood, and Surrey stopped responding to emergency calls.

The air was clean, the birds sang, and the children played in front of their houses.

But as Motorists and hauliers like to remind us in the comments thread every time another bike-vs-truckGrauniad article gets published, we all rely on the roads; you may ride your bicycles and walk around town in your sandals, they say, but those lentils and that tofu still got here in a truck. And indeed, the Institute of Directors promoted the impressive and comprehensively meaningless statistic that the blockades had cost the economy a biiiilion pounds. Our economy and our way of life — for every one of us, even the lentil eating sandal cyclists — is entirely dependent on road transport and road haulage, and they can completely shut it down — the post, the trains, the hospitals and our food — in a week and a half.

After the Battle of Orgreave, when police set upon the striking miners, Thatcher said of the industrial action:

I must tell you … that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. [CHEERS] It must not succeed.

The miners, Thatcher said, were attempting to impose their will on a country that did not want it; they were holding the country to ransom, and that was unacceptable. She had a simple solution that prevented them from ever doing that again. She destroyed them by completely cutting the country’s reliance on domestic coal — by destroying their power and their industry.

On the 14th September 2000, Tony Blair said of the refinery blockades:

No government, indeed no country can retain credibility in its democratic process or its economic policy-making were it to give in to such protests. Real damage is being done to real people.

The hauliers were attempting to impose their will on a country that did not want it; they were holding the country to ransom, and that was unacceptable. Those sound like the words of the sort of politician who would take serious action to reduce the dangerously bloated power of a single industry — an industry on which we all rely, but on which we do not need to rely. You would expect that the fuel protests would have added extra urgency to the already compelling case and myriad reasons in favour of reversing the harmful growth in car and road haulage dependency.

Perhaps you would expect them to have electrified all the mainline railways by now? Maybe they would have constructed a new high-speed north-south rail artery to free up the saturated West Coast Main Line for freight? How about new rail freight distribution infrastructure in urban goods destinations? You would certainly have expected them to look at reforming the planning laws, transport infrastructure, tax and regulation that were making it attractive for cities and businesses to carry on creating new dependencies on cars and hauliers, and unattractive to reduce them — the sort of reforms that would reverse the absurd development that now makes it easier for food stores to create national mega-distribution hubs than to stock the food made down the street.

You certainly wouldn’t expect to see a great shift in modal share towards road haulage. You wouldn’t predict rail freight stagnating for want of line capacity and end-to-end infrastructure. You wouldn’t expect supermarkets entrenching their dependency on long-distance road haulage with ever greater centralisation. You’d never believe that the Royal Mail would abandon those few things that did keep the post moving during the blockade — the Travelling Sorting Office trains, London’s awesome underground Mail Rail, and the simple delivery bicycle.

Trend 5.2 – Domestic freight lifted by mode: 1980 to 2008

Million tonnes

Road

Rail

Water

Pipeline

2000

1,693

96

R

137

151

2001

1,682

94

R

131

151

2002

1,734

87

R

139

146

2003

1,753

89

R

133

141

2004

1,863

100

127

158

2005

1,868

105

133

168

2006

1,940

108

126

159

2007

2,001

102

126

146

2008

1,868

103

123

147

Coverage: Great Britain

Source: Department for Transport (road and water), Office of Rail Regulation (rail), and Department of Energy and Climate Change (pipeline)

The 2000 fuel crisis was a wake up call. Happily for the contently sleeping politicians and planners, it came with a snooze button.

The banking crisis was caused by banks having lent too much money to too many people who couldn’t afford to pay it back. But why couldn’t they afford to pay it back? Because all through 2007 the price of oil climbed relentlessly, breaking US$130 in the summer of 2008, just as everything was starting to collapse. In the good times, Americans had bought a house and his-n-hers SUVs on cheap mortgages and loans. They made hay while the gas was $2/gallon. In 2007 it hung around $3/gallon, and in summer 2008 it broke $4/gallon. People found themselves paying twice what they had planned for transport, and suddenly they couldn’t pay their mortgages and loans.

But the recession was more than just the banking crisis. It didn’t help borrowers that the high fuel costs were pushing up inflation and interest rates. But it also didn’t help that the fuel costs were beginning to destroy businesses and put people out of work. Partly that was because, to keep their cars running, people were tightening their belts and not spending on the luxuries. But partly it was because a lot of businesses, just able to scrap by in the good times, were built on cheap transport, and when transport turned out not to be a cheap as planned, those businesses collapsed.

The banking crisis was just a symptom of a recession caused by a global economy that is over-reliant on an unstable resource. The bankers failed to see the crisis coming (or saw it but saw no reason to do anything about it). But anybody who was looking at oil prices saw it. Recessions follow oil shocks like day follows night.

Our economy is dangerously unbalanced and poorly prepared for the inevitable oil shocks to come, shocks which are becoming ever more frequent as we pass peak production and head into decline. Too many businesses and too many jobs are built on a needlessly wasteful use of road transport. The short-sighted business world seems to think that the recurring cost of outsourcing tasks to companies who will drive stuff around is better business than making a one-off investment in the infrastructure that will allow them to do things themselves — the now routine practice of hotels outsourcing laundry being one of the more absurd results of artificially low road transport costs.

This week I was followed on twitter by @EdgarsCoolWater, who advised that anybody who wants water should check their website, where they could order a delivery. I boasted that I already have water, for my house features the ingenious invention plumbing. Edgar replied that some people in London and the South East aren’t so lucky. I can only conclude that some businesses would rather pay a weekly charge for water to be driven to them than the one-off investment in running water.

This is as much a bubble as the banking bubble. Some time soon the oil price will spike, the diesel price will jump again, and Edgar will have to pass on his costs to customers. Businesses that are already operating on the edge of profitability will cut jobs and go under.

This is the view from my office kitchen back when I had that real job (before I gave it all up to do this instead). The sun is rising over the city, with the Docklands towers just visible, pale in the distance between the Barbican towers.

The street in the foreground is Mount Pleasant. You can just see the Rosebury Avenue viaduct between the houses left of centre. Just poking into shot on the left is Mount Pleasant sorting office, the central hub of the London sorting offices.

And all this derelict land in the foreground has been cleared for overflow car-parking for the staff. I’m sure that the employees, even the 9-5 managers, would call to their defence the fact that this place operates 24 hours a day, which the tubular railways do not (shush, don’t mention the fact that buses and bicycles do).

But the presence of, and even more so the presentation of, the overflow car parking is significant.

Several floors beneath this building is the Mail Rail, an underground narrow gauge electric freight railway built by the Post Office in the mid 1920s to link Whitechapel sorting office in the east to Paddington station in the west via Liverpool Street station and several other central London sorting offices. There were once plans to link even more terminus stations and sorting offices this way.

Over the years those plans slipped away, ever more unlikely to be realised, as the Post Office, a nationalised industry unable to persuade politicians the treasury of the merits of such capital expenditure, discovered that it could do things cheaply and easily enough using our heavily subsidised road freight infrastructure. Indeed, trucking stuff around on our streets has been made so absurdly cheap that by 2003 the Post Office was telling us that Mail Rail cost five times what it would cost to truck the mail across town. It can’t have helped that there are a million health and safety rules on that sort of underground machinery, while society seems happy to let drivers kill and be killed in their workplace.

And it can’t have helped that the Post Office were, according to the unions, deliberately running down the railway, pushing up its running costs, and taking much of the mail by road anyway so that it could hide many of the costs of the truck depots and fleet from the estimates on the grounds that those would be needed, Mail Rail or not.

And so in 2003 it mothballed the Mail Rail and started driving dozens of 60 foot articulated trucks around town. Especially to the main sorting office, Mount Pleasant. Situated at the top of the Farringdon Road, most of them either come via Elephant & Castle and Blackfriars Bridge, or down the Euston and King’s Cross Roads.

Why would it close a perfectly good Mail Rail to invest in trucks and depots and drivers, making dubious claims about savings? Because it has a long term business plan that it can’t openly acknowledge. If the Post Office were to remain doing what it has always done, it would make good business sense to maintain the Mail Rail, a fantastic device that allows them to get the mail in to and between its central London sorting offices without having to drive trucks into the central zone. But the Post Office doesn’t expect to be doing what it has always done. It has already lost its state monopoly — albeit in the most bizarre fashion which allows private companies (and subsidiaries of other countries’ state postal services!) to compete for the easy and profitable job of collecting the mail while obliging the Post Office to then do the more labour intensive job of taking it the “final mile” (Mount Pleasant is a much more colourful place since the DHL and UPS and UKMail and, my favourite, Norbert Dentressangle trucks started turning up to dump their letters on the poor posties). And the process of privatisation has slowly eased along over the years, reaching, last month, the passage of the act that allows the government to sell the company, if and when it is ever ready to do so. Once complete, ever more of the Post Office’s business, including delivering to that final mile in places where, as in London, it can be profitable, will go to the cheaper competitors, unencumbered by such expensive frills as unions and customer service.

And I’m willing to put money on what happens next, either while the government is rushing to get the business into a state that looks attractive to potential buyers, or immediately after it has been sold off.

Mount Pleasant will be closed, sold off, and demolished. The building shows the signs of a bare minimum maintenance regime. Enough to keep it hobbling through. When they needed a bit more space to take the incoming mail, they built a corrugated iron extension in less than a week. Clearly not a structure they expect to last. And that car park. That wasteground overflow car park. Derelict land being kept derelict in central London. That’s an organisation that says: we won’t be long; we’re not putting down roots.

There will be an order to preserve the Mail Rail, behind a concrete slab in the basement of whatever “mixed-use development” replaces Mount Pleasant, just in-case circumstances change and a use is found for it in the future. But an accident or act of untraceable night time vandalism during construction will result in the tunnels being flooded and written off.

Indeed all central London sorting offices will close, for they all sit on extremely valuable land whose sale will help keep the company’s books looking healthy for a while. The sorting offices will consolidate into just a few. Big metal barns on the ring roads. It’s already happening in Yorkshire. Perhaps there will be one at Staples Corner for the mail from the north. One in North Greenwich for the mail from the continent, coming through on trucks loaded on the Shuttle. Sites convenient for the motorways and the North Circular. Not like Mount Pleasant and the other central sorting offices, hidden away on little city streets.

No more will you see the posties on their iconic Pashley cargo bikes. They tried to get rid of them already, but they discovered that there wasn’t enough room at Mount Pleasant and Oxford Street to store that many new vans. The new sorting offices will have room. They’ll have to, if they’re going to do central London rounds that start from the North Circular or beyond. No one at the Post Office will mention the loss of the Pashleys, but they’ll press release the fact that the new sorting offices’ motorway-side locations mean that they will no longer have to drive 60ft articulated trucks through central London streets, and the mayor and the cycle campaigners and the bloggers will celebrate.

This is why “smoothing the flow” doesn’t work. Making the roads easier to use and more reliable reduces the cost of road transport and allows businesses ever more opportunities to change their practices and cut their costs by using more road transport. Create capacity and somebody will create a way to fill it. It’s great for business, they say. Why should a shop pay expensive central London rent for a store room when it can drive its stock in from a cheap barn on the north circular? Why should a hotel invest in a washing machine and a maid when it could have its laundry driven to a cheap barn on the north circular? Why should a bar pay up-front for an ice machine when it can have ice driven in from a cheap barn on the north circular?

Why should the Post Office maintain central London sorting offices, bicycle deliveries, and an underground freight railway, when its competitors are all operating out of barns on the north circular?

Because we pay for it. Road freight isn’t cheap, it simply avoids paying its bills. We pay for the rehabilitation and lost income of the people hit by the vans. We pay for the care of the people dying from air pollution related diseases and sedentary-lifestyle related diseases. We pay for the trains and taxis and buses because cycling and walking is difficult and unpleasant in a city choked with vans and trucks. We pay for the noise pollution and the water pollution. We — or Camden taxpayers, anyway — pay for the bollards that they’re constantly knocking over outside the Packenham Arms, ’round the back of Mount Pleasant. And we pay because making this kind of business cheap makes other kinds of business difficult. Liveable cities attract businesses and talented employees, retail spend, and tourism. London, we are regularly reminded, is competing with the other great world cities and European capitals to attract the headquarters of big companies and major employers.

The Post Office isn’t cutting its costs, it’s externalising them, dumping them on the rest of us, like the competitors who in turn dump the expensive bit of the business of delivering mail on the Post Office.

This business plan, of course, depends on road transport remaining cheap and easy for all time. Like the railway closures of fifty years ago, we will look back at this era and marvel at the short-sightedness of it all.

Too busy even to make lunch, I picked up some of the ever awesome streetfood from Simply Thai at Exmouth Market. Interestingly, TfL had picked the market as a method for distributing their latest marketing campaign: some truck shaped postcards reminding one that undertaking at junctions can be fatal. The campaign has prompted another outburst of blogging noting that the authorities are engaging in victim blame and doing too little to improve standards of drivers and hauliers. The Cycling Lawyer, for example, discusses the need for more cuddlier trucks in London. The Lawyer suggests that rather than frightening cyclists, the authorities should be thinking about things like enforcing proper design standards on lorry owners, and reducing urban speed limits. The LCC have at least retaliated with their own truck/cyclist safety campaign.

What never seems to be asked at all, though, is why these trucks are even driving into London. It is always simply assumed that they have to be there. Suggest in public that the congestion charge should be many times higher, or that central London roads should simply be closed to private and commercial motor transport altogether, and somebody will point out that we all rely on the goods that are driven in. It would be unfair to penalise those whose livelihoods depend upon cheap and easy access to our city centres. People doing vital things — like the truck delivering ice to an establishment on Charing Cross Road during last night’s critical mass; the truck on the double yellows blocking Ludgate Hill in the monday morning rush hour so that it could deliver critical life sustaining water to offices; or the truck on Queen Victoria Street that was filling up with dirty table cloths to be taken to an industrial estate for washing. How else do you propose that offices might get water, bars get ice, or hotels get clean towels?

When the Congestion Charge was introduced, traffic in central London fell by 25%: the roads freed up and journey times fell by a third. But three years in, traffic was only 16% below pre-CC levels. By the end of 2007, traffic speeds and delays were back to pre-CC levels. The long-term effect that the Charge has had is a shift in the make-up of central London traffic rather than a reduction in congestion or emissions, or an improvement in our environs. Unfortunately, Boris seems to have stopped collecting data on the CCZ traffic, but the data from 2007 already hints at a trend (take a look at page 40 of the TfL report for a nice visualisation of the change in the context of overall numbers of vehicles):

So cars (shame that they grouped these with minicabs, which I suspect have a very different profile) fell immediately and stayed down, at least as far as 2007. Many of those drivers shifted to taxis; a few took to bicycles and motorbikes (but the effect is not impressive, given the low base rate compared to cars). But the potentially interesting pattern, I think, is how vans and lorries initially fell (although, as we would expect given their vital work, by much less than cars), but have since started growing again. It’s a shame that the data stops three years ago, too soon to draw any definite conclusions about a growth trend for deliveries. But it’s enough for me to speculate on a hypothesis.

My hypothesis would be that, by initially reducing the journey times through central London, the congestion charge had the counter-intuitive effect of making it cheaper and more attractive for businesses and organisations to drive ever more goods through town. Transport infrastructure projects have shown again and again that in highly and densely populated places like England, there is always far more latent demand for transport infrastructure than can ever be provided. Create vacant capacity and within a decade or so, people will have found a way to use that capacity. (Take it away, and within a decade everybody will have forgotten why they needed it.) Offices and bars have discovered that driving bottled water and bagged ice into town is so absurdly cheap that it’s a more attractive deal than buying a mains water cooler or an ice machine; hotels have discovered that driving their bedsheets to a barn on the M25 makes more business sense than paying for a washing machine and a maid to operate it. Waste has become cheap. All London’s spoons are plastic now.

The numbers from TfL aren’t good enough to say whether businesses are or are not finding creative new ways to re-fill central London’s briefly free-flowing roads. But opposite the Exmouth Market stands one great big anecdote: the Royal Mail. The Mount Pleasant Sorting Office is the largest in London, situated amongst the creative industries and start-ups of Farringdon — not the busiest part of zone 1, but well within the CCharge Zone. The Mail must contribute thousands of pounds to the CCharge every day for the scores of articulated trucks — including road trains with multiple trailers — and hundreds of vans that drive the mail into central London from around the country and around the world, to be sorted and driven out again. These are the trucks that you have to watch out for turning at Old Street or the Elephant & Castle. These are the trucks that will broadside you changing lanes on the Farringdon and King’s Cross Roads. These are the trucks that TfL are warning you about while you buy your lunch in the shadow of the sorting office at Exmouth Market.

Alongside Mount Pleasant, the Post Office had a dozen big district sorting offices in central London. Today it drives mail between the remaining ones in articulated trucks. But for 76 years, the mail was shuttled between seven of the sorting offices on awesome little computer-controlled electric trains that ran on the private underground Mail Rail line, from the Whitechapel office to the Paddington office. It collected the out-of-town mail straight off the trains at Paddington and Liverpool Street, and sent the mail out again to the same stations. At their final destination offices, the mail would of course be loaded on to bicycles for the final mile to your door. Very little mail now comes in by train; the bicycle they announced this year was over — the roads have become too dangerous lately, they said. And the quiet, safe, direct and dedicated little electric railway under London? The Royal Mail announced its closure in April 2003, two months after the Congestion Charge was introduced. Running a railway had not become more difficult or expensive, but driving a truck had become vastly easier and cheaper.

The Congestion Charge is a great money maker for TfL, and a great incentive for a section of drivers to give up their cars. But as a mechanism for keeping London traffic moving, it might ultimately be doomed to failure, along with all the other schemes that attempt to solve road transport problems by creating vacant road capacity: there will always be somebody with a new idea for using that capacity. Again, the only hope for our city centres seems to be to reduce road capacity: to close a significant proportion of roads and lanes for private motor vehicles. The offices and bars and hotels will cope. They might even rediscover that magical device that we all have: the one that produces water at the merest turn of a tap.

Thirty-six years ago, the streets were empty. The National Union of Mineworkers had spent half-a-year working to rule; coal-stocks had slowly dwindled and the power stations had all run out. Factories and offices shut down; everything stopped. Twenty-six years ago, the NUM walked out completely, and stayed out for a year. But nothing except the mines themselves shut down. Thatcher had pre-empted the strike. The mines had been sent into overproduction long before and the power stations all had stockpiles. The country had the means to import coal. And in the mean time, power generation had shifted further into oil, gas and nuclear. The government had made sure that the industrial action could not cripple the country.

Ten years ago today, the streets were empty. The Road Haulage industry, with the support of the petroleum industry, had blockaded the oil refineries and fuel distribution network for eight days, and the country’s petrol stations had been dry for four. The private stockpiles of companies with fleets were running out, and the little that was left had been reserved for the emergency services. Train companies operating non-electrified lines cancelled services — and this time they even had an excuse for it. Tesco began rationing food, and the post went uncollected and undelivered. Hospitals ran out of blood, and Surrey stopped responding to emergency calls.

The air was clean, the birds sang, and the children played in front of their houses.

But as Motorists and hauliers like to remind us in the comments thread every time another bike-vs-truckGrauniad article gets published, we all rely on the roads; you may ride your bicycles and walk around town in your sandals, they say, but those lentils and that tofu still got here in a truck. And indeed, the Institute of Directors promoted the impressive and comprehensively meaningless statistic that the blockades had cost the economy a biiiilion pounds. Our economy and our way of life — for every one of us, even the lentil eating sandal cyclists — is entirely dependent on road transport and road haulage, and they can completely shut it down — the post, the trains, the hospitals and our food — in a week and a half.

After the Battle of Orgreave, when police set upon the striking miners, Thatcher said of the industrial action:

I must tell you … that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. [CHEERS] It must not succeed.

The miners, Thatcher said, were attempting to impose their will on a country that did not want it; they were holding the country to ransom, and that was unacceptable. She had a simple solution that prevented them from ever doing that again. She destroyed them by completely cutting the country’s reliance on domestic coal — by destroying their power and their industry.

On the 14th September 2000, Tony Blair said of the refinery blockades:

No government, indeed no country can retain credibility in its democratic process or its economic policy-making were it to give in to such protests. Real damage is being done to real people.

The hauliers were attempting to impose their will on a country that did not want it; they were holding the country to ransom, and that was unacceptable. Those sound like the words of the sort of politician who would take serious action to reduce the dangerously bloated power of a single industry — an industry on which we all rely, but on which we do not need to rely. You would expect that the fuel protests would have added extra urgency to the already compelling case and myriad reasons in favour of reversing the harmful growth in car and road haulage dependency.

Perhaps you would expect them to have electrified all the mainline railways by now? Maybe they would have constructed a new high-speed north-south rail artery to free up the saturated West Coast Main Line for freight? How about new rail freight distribution infrastructure in urban goods destinations? You would certainly have expected them to look at reforming the planning laws, transport infrastructure, tax and regulation that were making it attractive for cities and businesses to carry on creating new dependencies on cars and hauliers, and unattractive to reduce them — the sort of reforms that would reverse the absurd development that now makes it easier for food stores to create national mega-distribution hubs than to stock the food made down the street.

You certainly wouldn’t expect to see a great shift in modal share towards road haulage. You wouldn’t predict rail freight stagnating for want of line capacity and end-to-end infrastructure. You wouldn’t expect supermarkets entrenching their dependency on long-distance road haulage with ever greater centralisation. You’d never believe that the Royal Mail would abandon those few things that did keep the post moving during the blockade — the Travelling Sorting Office trains, London’s awesome underground Mail Rail, and the simple delivery bicycle.

Trend 5.2 – Domestic freight lifted by mode: 1980 to 2008

Million tonnes

Road

Rail

Water

Pipeline

2000

1,693

96

R

137

151

2001

1,682

94

R

131

151

2002

1,734

87

R

139

146

2003

1,753

89

R

133

141

2004

1,863

100

127

158

2005

1,868

105

133

168

2006

1,940

108

126

159

2007

2,001

102

126

146

2008

1,868

103

123

147

Coverage: Great Britain

Source: Department for Transport (road and water), Office of Rail Regulation (rail), and Department of Energy and Climate Change (pipeline)

The 2000 fuel crisis was a wake up call. Happily for the contently sleeping politicians and planners, it came with a snooze button.